¿Dónde están los mayas ? Community-based tourism as an identity claim in Yucatan

Abstract

Located behind the Cancun-Riviera Maya coast in Mexico, the Mayan hinterland is both a Latin American and a global tourism hotspot. In addition, it is home to many social enterprises dedicated to community-based tourism whose increasing development in the Mayan villages over the past twenty years gave way to a community-based tourism actors networking process. Two community-based tourism networks, Co’ox Mayab and Caminos Sagrados, have thus emerged in the last five years. While the integration of the global tourism system is part of the development strategy of these networks, the identity claim of the Maya actors who carry these projects cannot be ignored in a context of socio-environmental conflicts in which tourism plays a leading role. Indeed, the Cancun tourism boom and its extension on the Playa del Carmen-Tulum coastal corridor is now getting to the Mayan hinterland where touristic products and services focus on the Maya biocultural heritage (lagoons, cenotes, local gastronomy, ceremonies, traditional medicine). Such a process definitely led local Mayas to take over tourism. Through an ethnographic inquiry based on interviews and participant observations in Mayan villages and at the heart of the Co’ox Mayab cooperatives network, this paper reflects on tourism as both a form of identity claim and a form of visibility of local Mayan societies.